Fail whale explained
by Mike, posted on June 12, 2010
Twitter users have been seeing a lot of the fail whale lately, and now there’s an explanation as to why that’s been happening, and that explanation comes directly from a Twitter engineer.
As one might guess, it has to do with the immense popularity of the site, or more specifically the amount of data that’s associated with that popularity. What happened most recently, however, was that the internal network at Twitter was basically overloaded, misconfigured, and not monitored correctly, leading people to see our old friend the fail whale a little too often.
To address the issue, Twitter has increased its internal network’s capacity, improved monitoring, and has balanced the traffic more efficiently. All this, they say, should allow them to increase their capacity to the level it needs to be at well before user demand dictates it.
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